This section introduces aspects that may facilitate a better understanding of the disclosure. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
Mobile broadband continues to drive a demand for higher overall traffic capacity and a higher achievable end-user data rate in a radio access network. Several application scenarios in the future will require data rates up to 10 Gbps in local areas. The demand for very high system capacity and very high end-user date rates may be met by networks where a distance between access nodes ranges from a few meters in indoor deployments up to roughly 50 m in outdoor deployments, i.e. with an infra-structure density considerably higher than the densest networks of today. The wide transmission bandwidth required for providing a data rate up to 10 Gbps and above may only be obtained from spectrum allocations in the millimeter-wave (mmW) band. High-gain beamforming, typically realized with array antennas, may be used to mitigate the increased path loss at higher frequencies.
MmW networks have a number of properties that, generally speaking, make operations under the shared spectrum promising. Due to a small antenna size at high frequencies, mmW networks heavily rely on high-gain beamforming, which enables significantly higher resource reuse and alleviate interference between multiple networks. In the meanwhile, interference in mmW networks may become link-specific or beam-specific rather than user-specific as in a traditional wireless cellular system. In order to handle the interference in mmW networks, the radio resource needs to be coordinated on a link/beam basis, which may be so-called “link-specific coordination”. Under such coordination, some interfering links/beams may be scheduled on constrained radio resources so that interfering transmissions do not or at least less probably end up on the same radio resources.